The automotive industry is under mounting pressure. Auto marketers are under siege as competition in the industry intensifies.
Against this unrelenting pressure, marketers are now looking for ingenious ways to navigate the market in a bid to remain competitive.
A priority for every automotive marketer out there is to drive sales and increase profits. Not so different from a ‘regular’ marketer, right?
Right, save for the added pressure of an ultra-competitive industry.
A marketer worth their salt understands the need to build personal relationships with customers. They know this helps drive performance, increase profits, and make the business competitive.
As your leads grow, it becomes harder to establish and maintain that personal touch with every customer. You know what that can do for your business, right? Loss of clients and ultimately, loss of revenue – and that’s just the beginning.
Fortunately, there’s a real, tried and tested remedy for this.
Bring in automation and it becomes so much easier to maintain contact with each customer. With automation, you, as an auto marketer, can effectively manage campaigns, integrate customer data, and segment customers.
Integrating automation into your auto business will greatly help you streamline processes not just for your marketing team but for other departments as well.
For marketers in the automotive industry, automation is also an integral marketing tool that helps maintain and manage relationships with customers. Automation ensures that you acquire the right leads, retain them, and make them loyal to your brand.
Automation for the Automotive Industry
When marketers use automation, they bridge the gap between their marketing channels. It becomes easier to handle content marketing, email marketing, social media, etc. Your focus becomes building relationships with prospective clients — instead of pure, greedy sales.
With automation, you can send targeted and personalized messages to customers with ease. Personalizing communication strengthens your relationship with customers and keeps your brand viable.
The internet has facilitated the seamlessness of the customer buying journey. The consumer is now more informed, and their needs are constantly changing.
Consumers also have access to huge amounts of information readily available online. This has now become a trend, especially when they need to find out other people’s experience. So, it’s now natural for someone planning to buy a car to start their car research online even before going to a car showroom.
Our whitepaper, How Marketers can Overcome Challenges in the Automotive Industry, delves deeper on this subject and also highlights opportunities for marketers in this highly competitive sector.
Here, you’ll also learn how you can strategically position your brand throughout the customer buying journey.
Using automation, you are now able to deliver informative and useful content to potential buyers when they need it throughout their purchase journey.
It’s all about providing the right information where customers are spending most of their time and converting them while they are online.
All you need to do is to consider your customers’ touchpoints and ensure your brand is present in all of them. Consider all the car buying moments, which include:
- Which car is best?
- Is it right for me?
- Can I afford it?
- Where should I buy it?
- Am I getting a good deal?
Combine this information with that of the auto buyer’s journey – from the awareness stage, through to the consideration, and the decision stages. Ensure you connect with them through the entire journey.
Nurture this relationship until the purchase phase and then continue with the communication even after buying in order to grow a loyal following. This is also a good opportunity to turn them into brand ambassadors.
With automation, you can also significantly improve the customer experience, which leads to satisfaction, retention, and an increase in revenue.
Once they have bought from you, continue sending them relevant messages without spamming their inbox. This will help with top-of-mind awareness and most importantly, encourage referrals.
A good experience, both offline and online, is important to customers. It helps them identify the dealer they want to do business with.
The experience they have will also determine whether they recommend you to family and friends. It will also determine what kind of reviews they share on their social media profiles. Positive reviews and ratings will lead to increased sales, obviously.
How Automation Can Help the Automotive Industry
Many industries have now realized the power of automation in their marketing mix. Businesses now have a lot of data, thanks to the various channels that they use to interact with their target audience.
Data collected by the automotive industry can be used to improve customer experiences. A car buyer today expects to get relevant messaging across all channels. A brand that remembers, recognizes and presents the right recommendations will reach a stunning 91 percent of buyers choosing to buy from them.
Using the right tools will allow you to collect insightful data. With it, you can determine who your buyer is, their demographics, their needs, what car they are currently driving, whether they regularly service it, etc.
The right data will drive your marketing campaigns and offer consumer insights that help you target your audience better.
In a nutshell, automation helps you to:
- Identify, attract, nurture, score, and convert prospects. You can identify high-profile leads and deliver those that are sales-ready to your sales team.
- Create dynamic content that helps you to reach your different clients. It helps you cultivate relationships and retain customers.
- Integrate different marketing channels to deliver unique customer experiences.
- Orchestrate customer engagement and distribute marketing content to individual customers across different channels. These channels may include websites, email, direct mail, social media, etc.
- Customize communication by creating messages that find customers at optimal touch points. You can add personal touches to your campaign using customer data. Their interests, goals, needs, etc. allow you to tailor content so that the messaging is spot on.
- Entice the customer with future deals, incentives, and offers using a non-invasive marketing method that is all about offering relevant and helpful information. Nurture prospects for the long term by connecting various channels (content marketing, social media, email marketing, etc.) and various touch points.
- Nurture leads and guide them through the conversion funnel instead of blasting them with adverts.
- Test, measure, and optimize campaigns to ensure increased revenue and ROI. You have a better view of analytics from the different marketing channels. You can measure the revenue contribution from each campaign to know which one is working better for what audience and which one isn’t.
According to various studies, 64 percent of marketers say that automation leads to more sales, increased online visitors, increased engagement, and better insights into their target audience.
The benefits of using automation include better quality of leads (37.7 percent), improved customer experience (45.9), improved message targeting (68.5 percent), and improved ROI in marketing (32.9 percent).
Conclusion
With automation, you can build strong relationships with your customers and ultimately boost profits. Automation also helps you stand out from the competition since you’ll be providing the consumer with informative content at their time of need and on the right channels.
Ninety-one percent of marketers believe automation is very important to the success of marketing programs.
Automation will revolutionize your marketing. It will position you in front of the right customer and at the right time. It will increase your conversion rates leading to an increase in revenue.
Professionally integrated automation offers you numerous tools that will provide you with insights into all stages of the sales funnel and even help you pick out leads that are ready to buy.
With automation, you can easily demonstrate how effective each campaign is and how it is impacting your bottom-line. It also helps spur creativity in your marketing team, which comes in handy when executing marketing campaigns.
In short, automation has become a must-have. Reaching prospects, scaling campaigns, securing better leads, and demonstrating ROI are now automation-driven.
